“The times were hard, but they were modern"

San Francisco International Film Festival

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Chile; Alicia Scherson, director
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Deep down, we all crave human contact; yet we isolate ourselves further and further, in our own little world outside blocked off by iPod earphones, locked in lives online, inundated by modern gadgets that prevent the need to face others in order to communicate. The world is getting smaller, but are we getting anything deeper than before?

In some ways, I understand what the poor girl in this movie, Cristina, is feeling. She gets a hint of another more materialistic way of life when she finds the stolen briefcase of a middle-class construction supervisor, Tristan, who has just lost pretty much any important in his life; his wife left for another man right before he got beaten up in an alley.

Cristina starts wearing Tristan's iPod and smoking his cigarettes while stalking him and his ex-wife. By doing so, she sees a part of Santiago, Chile that was never in her reach as a lower-class mapuche girl. She wants to be a part of Tristan's world. Towards that goal, she follows both of them so closely as to be able to sniff them on buses. She breaks into their fancy modern home, sits on their toilet naked and "borrows" Irene's black dress, shoes and even makeup. One hilarious scene is Irene being unknowingly followed by a drunk Tristan, who himself is being unknowingly followed by a still curious Cristina.

When Tristan and Cristina finally meet, it seems as natural to him as it is to her, even when he hadn't known about her the way she found out about him. For both, a simple hug in a hospital is the perfect culmination of her intense fascination with him and for him, the missing love and contact that had been absent from his ex-wife.

Simply a beautiful movie that just is.